


It will keep

by sternflammenden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2012-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-15 14:34:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternflammenden/pseuds/sternflammenden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Petyr and Barbrey commiserate and use each other at the end of the war and the end of the world.  Written for the got_exchange on LiveJournal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It will keep

She had always been so astonished, even in looking back through all of the years since, how easily she had been replaced. Brandon had not been one for sentiment or even good faith, and she had accepted it as a matter of course. It had been the price to pay for the brief happiness, the frantic affections that she had been allowed before settling into grey middle-age with a position, a title, a staid and gentle husband who neither thrilled nor repulsed her. And when he had come to her at the end, confessing the betrothal to a southron girl whose glances were modest instead of sharp, and whose affections were gentle instead of harsh, she had said nothing. 

Barbrey had only stared at Brandon, feeling a dull, rising disappointment at the confession, at the truth laid bare at last. She could feel him squirming under her unblinking gaze but she did not relent. It would be far too easy to allow him the courtesy of an easy goodbye, a wistful smile. And while his lips did not form apologies for his cowardice and his father’s grasping matchmaking, they did their penance in clashing with hers, in passing over her body, and in the early hours of the morning when they both lay spent and aching and almost dizzy, in parting. 

“I suppose I shall go then,” he had murmured, detaching himself from the tangle of his and her limbs in Barbrey’s soiled bed, fumbling with the rumpled clothing that he had strewn across her floor hours ago. She sat up, half-propped on an elbow, staring at him from under a thatch of tangled hair, observing the reds and purples and pinks that dappled his body, evidence of their love-making, of her presence. It was her parting gift. “Go and march to my doom.” He smiled then, that cocky smirk that she had once loved creasing his easy features. 

“Yes, go,” she whispered, not permitting herself to show much emotion, aside from a disdain that she feigned. “Go and meet your bride.” 

And he went, and Barbrey, when she was quite sure that she was alone, buried her face in her pillow and cried, soundlessly, achingly, digging first her fingers and nails into the blankets to vent her rage, then the pillow, then her hair, pulling it almost to the breaking point, enjoying the release that the pain permitted. 

She loathed herself then, in those moments.

*

Petyr had not known what to make of her at first. She had borne letters to the Lord Protector of the Vale, missives with the blessing of White Harbor in lieu of Stark, the merman’s seal embossed on the blood-stained parchment, standing the place of the lost wolfling who had been returned to them from a distant isle, mute and wild. Pickings had been slim at Winterfell after the world ended, and Barbrey had had no shame in taking the cast-offs of the dead to forge her freedom, to set her new life in motion. Manderly had been far too eager to comply, his appreciation for her clandestine support obvious in the scraping and bowing that had come her way, privately of course, when the Flayed Man had fallen. But he was too wily to truly trust her, and unwilling, as Roose Bolton had been, to keep her close, knowing how tenuous her loyalties were. After all, he had taken advantage of that.

_He was the first man_ , Barbrey thought with a wry smile, _to understand me._ She did not take sides in this war. She was merely a scavenger, an opportunist, and most pragmatically, a survivor. 

And so was Lord Baelish, at least from what she heard. 

It was not difficult to make her way to the Eyrie, with Dustin men escorting her, Manderly’s castoffs at her heels. The land was curiously silent, sullen almost, in the first grips of a long winter, and Barbrey took pleasure in the clean feeling of the cold wind against her cheeks, the sterile and deadly beauty of the snow that swirled around the horses’ legs (Ryswell’s remnants, but still better than the stilted mounts of the south), and the silence of the nights by which they traveled. 

And Lord Baelish had been so courteous, opening his doors to her and her men. Of course the hospitality of the Vale would be at their service. His smiles and bowing at first exasperated her with their contrived congeniality, but after a time, it was almost refreshing to be treated so well, to be a lady again, instead of the forgotten husk in widow’s weeds that she had played for so many years, or the scheming yet loyal sister-in-law who looked the other way in an elegant game of denial. He curried her favor, courted her almost, but Barbrey was no fool, and knew that it was more the scent of wolves that still clung to her, rather than anything else, that so caught his interest. 

There was a bastard girl, and a sickly boy, both ensconced in the tower with Petyr. She at first did not concern herself with children. After all, what was an unlucky get and a mad lordling to her? Nothing. 

*

Petyr did not permit himself to indulge openly in fits of nostalgia, but in his conversations with the Lady of Barrowton, he found his past subtly, and sometimes uncomfortably, thrust in his face. His cheerful mask remained a constant, a jibe forever on his lips, his brows set in an easy lilt. But he was not so foolish as to underestimate his guest. Her long silences and sharp glances, crowlike, caused him, at times, to imagine that she saw through his carefully-constructed guise, and had penetrated the secrets to his artificial world. And it was a pleasing world. 

When he saw her, he saw the boy Stark, Rickon, in his mind’s eye, and as she spoke in a low undertone of the northern troubles, he thought of how perfect their meeting was, how auspicious a coincidence, she in the confidence of a lost heir, he the mentor to another. While Alayne remained a paper bastard, the henna and solid, plain dresses doing their duty to conceal fiery hair and a regal bearing, he thought sometimes, only peripherally, of pulling aside the guise, joining his hand to Dustin in this matter. After all, she’d sworn loyalty to Rickon Stark, had been there when the Onion Knight had brought back a child more animal than human, clinging to a matted beast with flashing teeth and glowing eyes. It was a tale for the storybooks, and Barbrey had been a witness to it all.

Petyr did not intend to think on the past. He had dwelled too long on those matters, and although memories of old longings forced their way to the surface when he lay in his bed at the end of the day, or when he permitted himself the incautious luxury of one too many glasses of wine, he kept them well at bay. It was a necessity. It always had been. As long as he remained on the surface, they could do no harm. 

So tonight he allowed himself to think of Cat, to remember the old days at Riverrun, his disgrace, his bane, his rejection. And while he felt no true guilt over the recent death of his wife, he did grit his teeth as the memories of her fumbling attentions and desperate affections blended with and colored his more pleasant recollections of her sister. Where there was a bright flash of an unattainable smile and the dizzy anticipation of further that would all come to nothing, there was a hand half-unwelcome pressing his, an awkward kiss on his cheek, both helplessly intertwined and jumbled in his thoughts. When those memories faded, he found himself remembering what Lady Dustin had hinted at, an icy lilt in her voice as she alluded to Brandon Stark, a squandered maidenhead, and a bad death. While her lips had twisted in a smile, it had not met her eyes. It was an expression that he knew all too well. One he often saw in the mirror.

And when Petyr had had enough of it all, he willed himself to think of nothing, staring into the darkness until sleep came. 

*

She stood at one of the narrow casements, peering through heavy leaden decoration, Arryn’s birds in flight, at what little could be seen. The view was not normally much, just cloud cover and a sliver of the snow-capped lesser mountains and the eventual valley below. Such things were still a novelty for Barbrey, the flatter topography of her northern home an odd contrast to the rarified air of the Eyrie. Barrowton with its staid wooden halls, and even the Rills, with their slender streams that carved bright ribbons into the great expanses of sloping hills, were never so imposing. 

Days had made their way into weeks, which in turn, had become months. The war waged on in some parts further south, but the Vale had always lingered in stasis. The North had fallen silent, a hush while broken houses and their lords regrouped, rebuilt, reclaimed what had been torn asunder. She was glad to have kept her hands clean, to have kept her head above all of that petty squabbling. 

_Let them do the worst of it_ , she thought today, as she stared at the view before her. It was so _pure_ here, the snow unspotted by blood, the landscape unmarred by battle. 

When Barbrey turned, it was Petyr who stood before her, Lord Baelish, her unlikely companion. She had come to appreciate and carry a grim respect for his manipulations, and although she was not the foolish girl that she’d been, she now recognized the game for what it was, and knew that to him, she was merely a piece on a board. A significant one, but a trifle nonetheless, in the long run. It did not trouble her. After all, she had been so to greater men than this, and now, she was privy to the rules. 

And today, Lord Baelish had a secret to share. Barbrey did not permit the slight shock to show on her features when he told her the truth about the girl he kept. She had long presumed that someone of such surpassing grace was far more significant than a child gotten on the wrong side of the sheets. 

“Both of them, indebted then, to us,” she had said at last, thinking on Rickon Stark, and how she had funneled Dustin men to his service, and how she had convinced her father, still just as ambitious as ever in his dotage, to do the same with the Ryswell forces. 

Petyr smiled, and it was small, yet genuine. “She will rise again from the ashes, she will spread her wings, and we will have the Vale. And when that savage boy comes of age, we will have Winterfell as well.”

“We,” Barbrey said softly, enjoying the weight of the word on her tongue, heavy with hidden meanings, and hating herself for savoring it so. She listened then, a pleasant smile on her face, to yet another man’s grand schemes, nodding in agreement at just the right places. It would conceal well the knife that she carried in her heart, a blade well-cared-for, honed to precision. 

_It will keep._


End file.
